Short answer. It will be dismissed, not transferred. Rule 50 is explicit: an appeal erroneously taken to the Court of Appeals is dismissed outright. The same fate meets an appeal to the CA raising only questions of law, and an appeal by notice of appeal where a petition for review was required.
What the law says
An appeal erroneously taken to the Court of Appeals shall not be transferred to the appropriate court but shall be dismissed outright.
Rule 50, Section 2 — Dismissal of improper appeal to the Court of Appeals. Read the full provision →
What the law says
an appeal by notice of appeal instead of by petition for review from the appellate judgment of a Regional Trial Court shall be dismissed
Rule 50, Section 2 — Dismissal of improper appeal to the Court of Appeals. Read the full provision →
No transfer — dismissal outright
Many litigants assume a misdirected appeal simply gets forwarded to the right court, the way a misdelivered letter is re-addressed. The rule says the opposite: an appeal erroneously taken to the Court of Appeals shall not be transferred to the appropriate court but shall be dismissed outright. The appellate system puts the burden of choosing the correct forum and the correct mode on the appealing party, and the sanction for getting it wrong is the loss of the appeal itself — not a delay while the papers find their proper home.
The wrong vehicle is as fatal as the wrong court
The rule strikes down more than misaddressed appeals. Where the Regional Trial Court decided the case on appeal from a lower court, the route up is a petition for review — and an appeal by notice of appeal instead of by petition for review from the appellate judgment of a Regional Trial Court shall be dismissed. The destination may be right and the deadline met, yet the appeal still dies because it travelled in the wrong vehicle. Mode, forum and timing all have to be correct at once.
Pure questions of law do not belong in the Court of Appeals
An ordinary appeal to the Court of Appeals raising only questions of law shall be dismissed, issues purely of law not being reviewable by said court. The distinction is between asking what really happened — a question of fact, which the Court of Appeals can re-examine on the record — and asking what the law provides on facts nobody disputes, which is a pure question of law reserved to a different forum. An appeal that concedes the facts and argues only the legal conclusion has been filed with a court that cannot hear it.
Why this must be decided before filing, not after
The cruelty of an outright dismissal is its timing: it usually lands after the period for taking the appeal correctly has expired, leaving the judgment final. That makes the choice of remedy the single highest-stakes decision after losing a case. Before filing anything, establish which court rendered the decision and in what capacity, whether your grounds attack findings of fact or only conclusions of law, and which mode the Rules prescribe for that combination. Those questions are cheap to answer at the start and often unanswerable — in any useful way — afterwards.